Let’s see if I can get these pics to blog nicely from my phone.
Category Archives: Photos
Waterways festival
Pictures from today. The festival wasn’t that interesting to the boys, but they loved tramping around in the park and playing on the playground. C was more cooperative for pictures than D was. C also took a few pictures, including some of me and a neat one of his brother looking through a book.
Park adventures
Photos from the park today. We climbed on a very huge fallen tree, tramped through the brush on one of the small islands in the canal, and played on the playground. We also had a great discussion on archaeology, dendrochronology, growth rings on trees, and looked over the old graveyard.
Nana’s visit
My mom came for a visit for the boys’ birthday. Some pics:
Quilts in progress
I’ve been working on quilts for my boys, since they said they wanted some quilts after I made the quilt for their teacher’s baby. I found fabric with great white sharks on it, and just couldn’t resist for my little tough guys and their carnivorous-animal-loving ways. I bought some dolphins and orcas to go with it and drew out a relatively simple top – cutting it too small into complex blocks wouldn’t really display the fabrics. I measured their beds to see about what size to make it – not quite a twin, but larger than a toddler quilt, since they’re only 6. It should wind up being about 54″ x 69″.
So once I figured out the design and calculated the yardage I’d need, I took the boys to the fabric store to pick out the first of coordinating fabrics for sashing. They had told me they wanted their quilts to be identical, but couldn’t agree on a fabric. We wound up getting the same fabric in two shades of blue. C went with a true blue, D with turquoise. A bit of slashing with the rotary cutter and I laid out the blocks and snapped plan photos:
That one in the center of D's quilt is because I miscut a section of the turquoise and had to piece one of those blocks. Whoops
And then it was time to start sewing. It went pretty fast, since the blocks are so large – the large squares are 10″ – and the boys pronounced them “beautiful” and seem quite happy. There will be more sashing: first a 2″ narrow strip for which I already have the fabric, and then another 5″ strip which will have more of the four-patch blocks at each corner. My master plan is to end it there, but I’m not sure if I should have another narrow sashing, if that will make the binding work or look better. I still need to choose a fabric for that outside 5″ sashing anyway so still plenty of time to think about it.
Stitching away. The quilt top plan is printed out and taped to my shelves so I can refer to it during assembly. Makes it much easier not to mess up the layout!
So far so good. The quilts are larger than the baby quilt, so I’m still getting the hang of working with the larger amount of fabric. I’m not sure how I’m going to quilt these yet. Might be easier to hand-quilt them, or I might find out some pricing to have someone with a long-arm quilter do it. I want to have them done for the boys’ birthday, which gives me about 6 weeks to finish them. I’ll post some new pictures with further progress. Here’s a quick shot of the assembled tops:
